


steady and bright

by keithsforeheadtattoo



Category: Left 4 Dead 2
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-15
Updated: 2015-07-15
Packaged: 2018-04-26 03:13:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4987915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keithsforeheadtattoo/pseuds/keithsforeheadtattoo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>the whole cotton candy thing ends up being a joke since he doesn't want to hang around the food tents long, not really, not when he starts thinking of funnel cake and keith smearing a whole handful of powdered sugar on him.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	steady and bright

**Author's Note:**

> title is from "dear someone" by gillian welch (which i also drastically encourage listening to while reading)

ellis barrels through the tunnel of love. refuses to make eye contact with any of the plastic swan boat heads. even in his periphery they keep snagging the part of his memory where keith is dripping with filmy water, the length of his leg pressing a big wet stain into ellis's pants. 

the whole cotton candy thing ends up being a joke since he doesn't want to hang around the food tents long, not really, not when he starts thinking of funnel cake and keith smearing a whole handful of powdered sugar on him. keith's short, deep, dormant laugh.

ellis trudges with his hat brim and eyes down in a bowing path that takes him past a witch but not the shooting gallery because there's only one of those things he can handle now.

ellis pulled keith out of the two-foot tunnel moat and rode another three loops knee-to-knee with him in the damn swan while keith coughed up carnival fluids. punched him in his shoulder a thousand times because fuck it, he had just told him he didn't want to touch that rancid marlboro water.

he sighs like absolution when they hit kiddieland. they only ever went to whispering oaks late and fucked up and on dates and they never set foot in that part. so it's safe because his definition no longer accounts for whether there's something waiting inside to kill him.

he tells the team the drowning story cuz it's funny, funny like both types. he thinks of the rhubarb story and the time with the bee and the thing with that weird old man and the night all that shit happened at the ticket booth. all of those were funny, too, until he started walking through the marrowless bones of the backdrop of every one. 

the barns are full of corpses and corpses and corpses.

"georgia on a friday night," says nick.

ellis stares into a caramel apple in the dirt, coated with insects and blood.


End file.
